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Dynamic Core Across the Life Span

Instructors: Shelley Mannell, Julie Wiebe

Many populations experience difficulties achieving central stability within movement, function and fitness. Current evidence supports a model that trains a synergistic coordination of all of the components of the lumbopelvic musculature and neuromuscular postural strategies. Clinicians find it difficult to meet this challenge when applying a purely musculoskeletal model across multiple populations, from children with motor challenges to adolescents, from post-partum women to adults with neurological injuries. Yet all these populations have a need for improved central stability.

Dynamic Core Across the Lifespan provides clinicians with a new, innovative clinical model for building central stability that distinguishes itself from typical “core exercise” programming. Instead it incorporates a neuromuscular-based recruitment pattern, driven by the diaphragm and external cueing of the pelvic floor in precise alignment. The diaphragm acts as the gateway to the Dynamic Core system and breathing mechanics provide an accessible entry point into the system that can be applied across all patient populations from pediatrics to women’s health, from neurology to fitness and sport.

The Dynamic Coreprovides a systems model understanding of the interaction between the sensory, musculoskeletal, neurological and autonomic nervous systems. An integrative approach, it builds proximal to distal musculoskeletal efficiency, restores postural alignment and ensures ongoing postural control within functional movement patterns, ADLs and fitness while preventing compensations that contribute to injury.

Dynamic Core Across the Life Span presents practical evidence-based assessment and intervention strategies with immediate application in a variety of patient populations. At the conclusion of the course, participants should be able to:

* Identify the critical role of the pelvic floor and diaphragm in the anticipatory inner core system and for the maintenance of lumbosacral, sacroiliac, pubic symphysis, and pelvic-hip joint stability to ensure lower and upper extremity mechanics.

* Discuss the typical development of core strategy in children as well as deficits and compensations evident in children with motor and sensory dysfunction.

* Identify neutral pelvis and rib cage alignment that is essential to maintaining the relationship between the diaphragm and the pelvic floor and therefore optimize core function.

* Discuss the contribution of anticipatory core dysfunction on subsequent musculoskeletal, neuromuscular, and balance dysfunctions across the lifespan.

* Discuss the effects of brain injury and spasticity on “anticipatory core” function and postural control.

* Evaluate the function of each element of the “anticipatory core” through postural alignment assessment, observation of dysfunctional motor strategies, and external palpation (with appropriate age and population modifications).